I could do this a few different ways but I want to streamline as much as possible and have a single exact word for things like this, leaving open the possibility of using longer phrases at the speaker's whim.

žep bubblelila chrysalis, trap

Putting these together with an additional suffix gives župlilas "random; by chance". Literal meaning is roughly "like a bubble trap". I get that that makes no sense, but the gap between Poswa and its parent language is 4500 years, so there is plenty of time for the meanings of various words to diverge such that, etymologically, an originally compound word seems to have little relation to its now-opaque components. (And note the vowel change in the first syllable, which is regular.)

This could be topped off with ma "to see", džuttu "to meet, to have a date", busa "to greet" (originally a complete sentence meaning "I see you!"), or something else, probably depending on whether youre talking about a person or not. I think I'll use tatša "tangent path", though, since that would likely be its main use as a verb. So the final phrase is

župlilas tatša "to meet by chance, bump into someone"

Havent had the opportunity to do the huge posts I used to do lately so I'll just leave this as it is.

Edit: might as well at least add Pabappa: iblila tapa, same morphemes.-------next:

seafood

_________________Sunàqʷa the Sea Lamprey says:

Last edited by Soap on Wed Oct 25, 2017 7:06 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Tautisca: wodina edu, lit "water food" = all food items that come out of the water; Tautisca doesn't distinguish food from the sea and food from ponds, lakes, rivers etc. as separate classes.

Sorry, I forgot. Is Tautisca a Germanic language run through Latin--> Romance sound changes, or something else? I notice that /wodina/ looks like it could only have come from proto-Germanic or a very early stage of one of the individual languages.

Quote:

Next: to lead; steer; manage, govern

Another one with a rather farfetched etmology for me, in fact it's cognate to the last word I did.

Poswa:pižžimba "to govern, rule", from pys "animal" + lili "barrier, shield" + bumba "to govern, rule". Human civilization on planet Teppala is very primitive, and it's easy to see that an army might gain the right to rule simply by proving that they can keep predatory animals out of humans' homes and habitats. I only say it's a little bit farfetched because the third morpheme already contains the entire meaning of the word, it just had to form a compound because sound changes had made it unusable on its own.

Even though the etymology of this word is opaque to the speakers, I dont think it would get much metaphorical use, and that's why I did this one first so I can make a more flexible term to cover the general definition you led with.

"Steer" is a difficult one, and I may need to work on this some more, since a ship-happy people like the Poswobs would likely have an atomic root word for this. Right now the best I have is pempwembwa "to aim for the coast; to steer" ... but, likely I'd be better off just using something like siššap "to turn one's face" and extend it to ships metaphorically.

(edit: otoh, those two words will be the same length with the verbal endings added on, so maybe /pempwemba/ is best after all)

As for the other meanings, I have plenty of rules for leaders and bosses, such as farafta "leader, conductor, guide"; šuguta (essentially a synonym), wimba "parent, guardian; guide, conductor, leader"; woža "to precede all, be first in line, be the leader", and papae "boss", all of which have etymologies stretching back over 7000 years. Any of these could compound with wipi, roughly "to supervise", which comes from a word meaning to touch (pi again) someone's hair (wubwa), which transferred metaphorically from parents standing close to their children to bosses, teachers, etc keeping watch over the people they control.

The faraf- is etymologically "habitat balance", again with the farfetched etymology seemingly hearkening back to a mythical one-with-nature past, where the leaders are the people who keep the habitats in balance so that humans will have just enough food but not so much to attract other animals that might hurt the humans. -----------next:restaurant, cafeteria; eating place that has a separate building

Sorry, I forgot. Is Tautisca a Germanic language run through Latin--> Romance sound changes, or something else? I notice that /wodina/ looks like it could only have come from proto-Germanic or a very early stage of one of the individual languages.

Sorry, I haven't been on the ZBB for a couple of days. It's funny that I got two questions about Tautisca in a couple of days; I've explained what Tautisca is here.

Sorry, I forgot. Is Tautisca a Germanic language run through Latin--> Romance sound changes, or something else? I notice that /wodina/ looks like it could only have come from proto-Germanic or a very early stage of one of the individual languages.

Sorry, I haven't been on the ZBB for a couple of days. It's funny that I got two questions about Tautisca in a couple of days; I've explained what Tautisca is here.

OK thanks. I had it partly confused with a language someone posted elsewhere where Latin underwent Germanic and then Old English sound changes (even though that is the opposite of what I remembered it as).

masako wrote:

Soap wrote:

next: restaurant, cafeteria; eating place that has a separate building

I think words like this in Poswa will be perpetually on a sort of "idiom treadmill" ... an idiomatic expression is formed, sound changes make it opaque, and another idiomatic expression is formed, be it similar to or completely different from the original.

A very typical Poswa word I could use here is pabbapoppa, "(like) rabbits harvesting carrots", because rabbits on planet Teppala are comparable to humans in their ability to store food but still have the same stereotypical favorite foods that rabbits on Earth do. In Pabappa this word would emerge as the even simpler papapopa. Both words would get an -s suffix when functioning in a role similar to English adverbs. ("fervently", etc)

As I posted in another thread, Poswa makes use of SO compounds, consisting of an animate agent and a (usually) inanimate patient, behaving as a single morpheme, and with the ability to also behave as an ordinary single noun. In this case the SO compound is "rabbits with carrots".

The only hthing bothering me about this word is that I know I used rabbits because the word for rabbit in a different language is homophonous with a word meaning "to choose, prefer, favor" and I know languages dont generally coin phrases that are puns only in a distantly related language. But the flexibility of the Poswa system is such that the same meaning could be expressed with many different metaphors: fishermen/trout, children/toys, children/candy, etc ... although tbh toys would be problematic since the word for toy is itself a compound based on a similar formula, but .... with time, it could undergo recursion.

Tautisca: réx "king", réguni "queen" (and yes, they're cognate to Latin rex). The réguni is always a (current or former) king's wife, as the Tautisca have no concept of "reigning queen"; queens may be powerful in individual cases, but they cannot fulfill the sacral / priestly duties of kingship and so cannot be the formal monarch. The realms of most régai are rather small, more like petty kingdoms or principalities in our world. The Tautisca also know the Roman title imperátor, but it's never used for Tautisca rulers, only for Roman emperors.Next: to ride

Im not quite sure how to go about this .... the translation I want is "own-name". That is, "I own-named the contract", which comnjugates fine as a verb but I have no idea how to write the dictionary form.

Poswa: Wifurifupi šoppabibi.I signed the contract.

I guess that means "name" is an inalienable noun? But not really, since the word for name is šoppaba, plain and simple. It's more like "to sign" is an inalienable *verb* ... since without the person suffix on, it would just mean "to use a name". I'm not really sure how to handle this. Either I need some dummy morpheme that means "one's own" or it just will have to be ambiguous between the reflexive and the transitive?? meanings of the verb. And that's still not right, because it isnt a reflexivle verb at all ... I already have a reflexive verb marker, -p, but that would just mean "to name oneself".

Im not sure how natlangs with inalienable nouns handle this, but that's where I will probably need to look if i want natlang help here even though it isnt actually an inalienable noun.

bwifo "guest, visitor". Early etymology is "in the palm of a house", where palm came to be used metaphorically for a general locative as the original locative marker often became silent.

Usually this word is used as a verb, as Poswa prefers to avoid nouns when speaking of transitory actions like this. The noun form would mostly appear as an indefinite object of a compound, either a noun or a verb. Thus one hears

Bwifypi!Be my guest!

With a fusional marker showing a 2nd person agent, 1st person patient, and the imperative mood.

Poswa: napfapae "to interfere, block, hinder", literally "to put thorns in (someone's) feet". Not all intervention is negative, of course, but I already have words for "help" so I wont post those here. I dont really have a good neutral word, though, like "participate", which is probably much more important ... I could perhaps go with sivbia, an ad-hoc compound that means "to join a situation", but that consonant cluster has been bothering me lately. THe word for "situation" might need to go, anyway ... it's too simple a structure for its meaning. But the concept is there, so thatll have to do for now.

There is also kwi "constant, stable, not variable" which looks like it could be cognate to an obsolete word for ghost, or to a name for God (but not both). The etymology I have in the dictionary doesn't line up with either of these, however, it just lists the word as an indivisible morpheme.

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